


M and Em(otional terorism)'s

by manthem



Category: RWBY
Genre: F/M, Pining, i couldve tagged this 'unreliable narrator' but hes not being like facetious, mercurys just kinda stupit, very unproductively
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-19 07:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29622864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manthem/pseuds/manthem
Summary: Kids in the woods, catching feelings.
Relationships: Mercury Black/Emerald Sustrai, implied
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17





	M and Em(otional terorism)'s

It’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair that she gets to look like that and move like that. It’s not fucking fair that she never had to eat her own teeth, or get a part of her body chopped off and stolen, to arc through the air like she was born to. To swing her scythes like they’re an extension of her body, to lean on her semblance at every possible opportunity. It’s not fucking fair that all that skin is unscarred; that she can walk around in short sleeves with a bare stomach and nobody calls the cops. She doesn’t even wear armour, just floating through every fight like she’s untouchable, hair flying out behind her in the wind. She’s like a bird. He perfected his aim shooting down tiny songbirds in the deep forest. He starts pulling her hair. She starts punching him on the arm. It’s the most physical contact he’s initiated with another person on purpose in his life. 

Cinder dumps them just outside of Vale. The city. He complains to Emerald about how stupid and confusing it is to give a city and a kingdom the same name until she snatches a tourists wallet and tries to buy his silence. It’s the first time somebody’s offered him money all his own. Even the card Cinder left with Em is linked to her scroll, so she’ll always know exactly how much they spend and on what. But Emerald has cash, and for an hour of peace so does he. It becomes a game to provoke her as much as he can without speaking; making faces behind her marks' backs, tapping her shoulder to make her look, answering every question she asks with half a mind with his worst impressions at charades. She’s more fun to be around without Cinder, he thinks. She’s dropped the self consciousness that makes her second-guess all her words; the puppy eyes whenever Cinder snaps at her; all the fucking kowtowing. She already punched him but now she’ll shove his arm, too, palm flat and warm against his bicep. She even laughs sometimes, against her will, a brutal critic of his comedy to the end. His first instinct in a quip is usually his cruellest, but it's a satisfying surprise to find they have that in common. She’s funny when she’s vicious, and they get good at talking without talking, even when he starts turning down her bribes. 

They bounce through Vale (the kingdom) as Cinder directs them, without any real goal of their own. They’re muscle, mostly, for Taurus’ Fang outposts. Sometimes running intel. Very rarely hitmen. Someone’s running Cinder, too, she’s been honest about that, but he doesn’t care to find out who yet. The day to day of whatever assignment-of-the-week Cinder’s sent them, of fucking with Emerald so she’ll shove back, of learning how to operate as a partnership with a prickly, bitchy slip of a girl who keeps “accidentally” shoving him when they’re standing over flights of stairs, is enough to think about for now. At least they’re getting a lot of opportunities to work on team attacks like this. It kills him to witness her competency. Her weapon is ridiculous, to the degree that she must have built it herself. The blades of her scythes are new but the pistols are nicked to shit and he has no idea where she got that chain. All of it must have been stolen at one time and she fusses over it’s individual pieces like it’s alive every time she disassembles it for maintenance. It’s easier to carry their toolkits if they’re combined in one, they don’t need doubles of the same screwdriver, but now she pays attention when he has to work on his legs. She doesn’t say anything about them in the same way he doesn’t bring up how she still shovels food down like it might get snatched out of her hands at any moment, but she still watches him go over the hydraulics and the joints like a mechanic. She’ll talk about his boots though, and not all of her advice is terrible. It was her idea to magnetise his clips to make reloads faster, and they built the prototypes together in a shitty chop shop in-between Dust runs. 

He makes her drill hand to hand forms, trying to teach her to throw punches like a professional. Just in case she loses her weapon. Just in case she loses her semblance. In revenge she makes him practise swinging through abandoned villages and thick forest on her chain. She telegraphs all her crosses so obviously she might as well put up a billboard and laughs at him mercilessly every time he mistimes a release and smacks into a wall. It’s so much more fun for them to do what they’re good at, her running interference long-range so he can smash skulls to pieces up close and personal. Grimm are so easy they might as well not even bother at this point; he lives for the fights against a real fellow consciousness, and he thinks she does too. 

They’re on orders not to leave a trail that can be followed, including bodies or broken bones, but he’s seen her temper now, and life is so much more interesting when she goes apeshit. They’re just out of a train robbery, the most action they’ve seen in weeks, and he’s still scrubbing blood out from between the treads of his boots. It’s her idea to stop at the inn. He wants to argue, sleeping in an enclosed space surrounded by strangers twigs out his paranoia like nothing else, but he can smell the meat they’re grilling too. Both of their stomachs sound like the last thing they ate was a thundercloud and he has to follow her in, only a little surprised that she doesn’t start floating along after the smell. She gets weirdly dreamy about the anticipation of food in a way that makes him want to poke at her, but she’s holding the money right now and he believes her threats to starve him out. There’s more people in the inn than he wants. They don’t look like huntsmen but they might just be lapsed. Or wasted. At least it doesn’t get the hostile kind of quiet that means they need to turn right the fuck back around. 

She’s all sweetness and sunshine when they come up to the bar: their cover is Haven students on an away mission, and she giggles like an angel when the barkeep says they must be very talented to be trusted so far from home. Another customer motions for a refill and he mimes puking before ducking around the hand that comes up to shove him off his stool. It might be the exhaustion, the leftover euphoria of a job well done, or her terrible influence, but they both inhale their brisket and potatoes like they’ve never eaten before. It’s almost a race. She wins. There’s rooms upstairs, so she moves to buy them a night in a one-room-two-beds deal, but he must be getting sloppy because he lets her go alone, just watching from his stool. He’d needled her about her lack of armour on and off for months before she dropped that she went without on purpose; if people are looking at her body they don’t watch her hands. He’s not allowed to be surprised when the table of grown men in the middle of the floor all turn their heads to watch as she walks by; it’s on purpose. Interference is her element, but an assassins assessment is his. It’s an assassin’s instinct that urges him to kick their heads clean off their necks. He doesn’t hear exactly what the man with the black hair and the battle axe says to her, which is probably a poor reflection of what he’s let his reflexes fall to, but he sees her stop. The man must take that as some kind of invitation to continue, reaching out to run his fingers through her hair, when she catches him by the wrist. Her throw isn’t perfect, which is probably his fault considering he taught it to her, but it flips the man onto the floor with a loud thud. ‘Wasted, then’ he thinks to himself as the rest of the table fails to react even as Emerald raises her foot. Her knowledge of anatomy when they met was good, but his was better. He had shown her exactly where the most vulnerable part of the wrist joint had been and feels a giddy pride when she slams her heel down with a crunch that means shattered bone. He can’t help the whistle of appreciation when she twists at the angle he taught her to dislocate the hand, picturing the shards shredding through tendons. Even if that hand gets splinted as soon as possible it’s never going to have the same mobility again. He watches the table move to attack with one eye, but the other is on her smile, all teeth and wild-eyed, as the inn floor explodes into violence. 

In the end they have to bail. It’s too cramped in there. On the bright side they don’t have to pay for dinner either. She hooks the ceiling-mounted candelabra and pulls it crashing to the floor while he flips tables and smashes them into wood chips. In the chaos most of the people in the inn devolve into friendly fire and she disappears them from view within the smoke. They book it for the trees, totally abandoning the trail. The sun is all the way down when she spots the cave they’re sleeping in and he’s so ready to make fun of her forever for losing her shit this way. She's pissed, he can see, and she hasn't dropped her sickles yet. He shifts into a fighting stance as she launches herself directly at his throat just to smash into his forearms like a bullet made of exploding knives. They know each other’s styles too well to properly hurt each other anymore, though not for lack of trying on her part at least. Maybe he’s getting soft, letting her swipe at him in close-range with just a parry here and there, when he could have put a boot between her eyes over and over now, but then she could also just reach into his brain and scramble it all to pieces, leave him insensate and drooling on the floor. Small mercies. She has a fast hook but he’s expecting it, more than that he’s expecting her to put the entire weight of her body into it, so when he catches her wrist and spins, she goes flying over his shoulder like a rag doll. He catches her by the shoulder, her reflexes catch her feet, and they both catch their breath. She was pure rage for a second there and he gathers up his aura in case she tries to shoot him in the face before she forces herself to take a deep and rattling breath. Lungs like treetops in a windstorm. He's never held another person before. She's warm. She still punches him in the arm to make him put her down and steals his jacket when she goes to sleep, curled in a nest of dead leaves. 

They stay up in the mountains. They’re not on call yet but they have the cover of shit signal to ignore a summons. Or at least he does. Emerald glances at her scroll at least once every other hour looking for Cinder’s next order. He tries to enjoy the hike. It’s a generally nice view with clean air and no people to sneak up on him. Except Emerald. Who still thinks it's at least a little funny to sort-of nudge him when they’re on a precipice, or to cheat a climb with her weapon and leave him at the bottom of the summit so she can throw tiny rocks down at him. She makes it up by spotting the hot spring. For starters it’s just sort of awesome to see the geysers blasting into the air reeking of sulphur, but then for seconders they find the lake. It’s boiling water, sending clouds of steam into the air that they can’t get too close to for danger of scalding, that has Em sprinting past the edges of it like she doesn’t care and looking for the runoff pools. He has to chase her down before she slips on the sodden rocks and bashes her minty skull in, going off the smack of her boots and the glint of her pistols. There’s a whoop of noise from her and then nothing and he feels his whole stomach fall out of his body and drop onto the floor. He can’t help the panic shout of her name. Her head pops up over the side of a cliff he couldn’t see shouting “MERC LOOK”. He’s fully ready to kick her ass all the way off the fucking mountain for giving him that heart attack when he spots her again through the much thinner mist, skinning off her belt and boots. The ping pong between terror and rage and terror again is almost enough to make him feel like he’s back home again, but incredulity wins. He starts yelling by the time she’s working on the straps of her top and she looks up at him like he’s the crazy one for not getting naked in the open fucking mountain air. She gestures in the general area of her little runoff pool as if that’s an answer. 

She wins the argument. Or he lets her. Whatever. She gets her mountain hot spring bath with his legs kicking out over the cliff on watch. It’s so completely fucking unfair how shameless she can be around him. Nobody is ever supposed to be this relaxed about him. Nobody who’s seen him kick a man so hard his whole head pops off like a party cannon is ever allowed to be this… vulnerable with him. But then again, he’s seen her decapitate a couple people at this point, too. Whatever. What would she do if he just started stripping out of nowhere? Probably nothing. It was practical for her to shower in gym locker rooms and truck stops and to swim in lakes when she could. It was practical to wear low-cut cropped shirts when it made her jobs easier. It was even practical at times to let other people see her fully naked. Or something. She was casual when she mentioned her first sort-of boyfriend (disappeared into thin air), and her second sort-of girlfriend (hit by a car, broken neck), and then her third friend-who-was-a-boy with benefits (arrested). She was surprised when he said he'd barely even seen people his age growing up, much less known them well enough to take his clothes or armour or weapons off. He can't understand how after everything she's lived through, after everything he's told her, after seeing what Cinder wants and how she gets it, how Em can still trust people enough not to rip her to shreds in the streets. It's probably his fault, for getting soft. He's the person she's around the most now, if anybody is responsible for her perception of the world it's him. If anyone is going to teach her to never, ever, ever lower her guard, it's him. He wasn't supposed to live this long, much less be this responsible for another person. 

"Are you getting in?" She flicks water on his neck and his brain short circuits. "Do your legs rust or something?...Merc? Hello?" She knocks on the back of his head. "Anybody in there?" 

"Emerald." He forces out, glaring at what he can see of the forest. "I am not getting naked on a mountain" 

"Mercury. It's been four days since the last inn. You smell" 

"Yeah and who's fault-" 

She splashes him. In the end he agrees to take his own bath if she'll put pants back on and do guard duty. She averts her eyes with great pageantry, slouching around in her green, stretchy, tube-shirt-thing and his jacket, leaving her chaps and boots scattered on the ground. She's humming some nonsense while she scans the trees. It's… relaxing. It's calm. It's beautiful; late afternoon sunshine over the mountainside, turning the mists to pure glitter. She's beautiful; shining cherry eyes and tongue sharp like a dagger. It hurts to know that, in the same way it hurts to look at her directly sometimes. But she's here, glowing softly, as the sun kisses her skin like the lovers she could have her pick of. She's missing pieces of her heart, mostly. He's seen her hiding her grimace from children, doting on Cinder, building prototypes of his clips. She'll get her heart back. Eventually. If Cinder doesn't eat it first. He's missing so many pieces of himself he can't even count them anymore. It wasn't supposed to matter this much. He's a gun in the shape of a person and he put himself in Cinders hand and ended up in Emeralds pocket without even noticing. She can never know. He can hear her voice in his head, the practised tone she uses to placate difficult marks. She'd call him Merc. She'd say that their partnership was a means to an end; that their loyalty is to Cinder's cause first. Her scroll buzzes for the first time in days and she lights up seeing the sender. It doesn't matter. They're going to Mountain Glen. He doesn't ask for his jacket back until they're well into the trees.

**Author's Note:**

> [i made a playlist if you want](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpiEunhVs9o&list=PL5P_WNsytvDLBw6QMOwpvlTUY68oZwns2)  
> im on tumblr @vaas


End file.
